A Feminist Journey through Beethovens Musical Structure Essay

A Feminist Journey through Beethovens Musical StructureTraditional digest of Beethovens use of Sonata Allegro form tends to focus on harmonic or melodic movement and key relationships. This study stretches such investigations to include questions of historical mount and philosophic motivations that drive a composer to structure music in a certain way. Ultimately this leads to an inquiry about how these traditions affect us as listeners, and much specifically how they relate to gender issues in a musical tradition primarily make up of male composers.Music of the 1700s is often characterized as highly structured and balanced. A favorite form for pieces of many kinds was the sonata form, which relies heavily on the basic movement between different tonalities (especially tonic and dominant or telling major). Ludwig van Beethoven wrote over 30 sonatas for piano alone and used the structure for symphonies and many other instrumental works. Most other composers of the classical convict ion period also used sonata form, and music historians have spent much time discussing why this might be so. Some historians pose this question strictly within a musical world How did earlier musical structures give rise to sonata form? Others ask what it was in the surrounding historical context that made sonata form appealing.William Henry Hadow and Charles Rosen are two historians who talk primarily about musical context. Hadow sets his discussion in the framework of classical composers movement away from baroque forms. He says that when Beethoven and his contemporaries chose ternary form over Baroque binary, typified in the dance suite, they chose a structure that was then used successfully into the 20th century. This was only poss... ...s in history. Works CitedAbbate, Carolyn. Unsung Voices Opera and Musical Narrative in the NineteenthCentury. Princeton Princeton University Press, 1991.Ballantine, Christopher. Beethoven, Hegel and Marx. Music Review. Vol. 33, 1972.Drake, Kenneth. The Beethoven Sonatas and the Creative Experience. IndianapolisIndiana University Press, 1994.Hadow, William Henry. Sonata Form. capital of the United Kingdom Novello and Company, Limited, 1979.McClary, Susan. Feminine Endings Music, Gender, and Sexuality. Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press, 1991.Mann, Thomas. Doctor Faustus. New York Alfred A. Knopf, 1948.Rosen, Charles. The Classical Style Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven. New York The Viking Press, 1971.Subotnik, Rose Rosengard. Developing Variations Style and Ideology in Western Music. Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press, 1991.